A series of recent events and revelations has raised concerns that Iran could be working to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program damaged during the 12-day war with Israel and the U.S., and that Russia could be playing a role in aiding the effort.

Iran withdrew last week from an agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency to allow the watchdog to inspect its nuclear sites, just after the U.N. agency’s board of governors passed a resolution calling on Iran to provide more complete information about its nuclear sites and remaining stock of enriched uranium. The resolution came as the IAEA’s chief, Rafael Grossi, said that there were indications of activity at some Iranian nuclear sites. 

Also last week, the Financial Times reported that Iranian scientists and nuclear experts visited Russian military research institutes a second time last year. The trip was organized by a front group for Iran’s Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research, which is behind the Islamic Republic’s nuclear weapons research. The extent of cooperation between the countries, however, is still unknown. 

Those developments come on the heels of a $25 billion deal between Russia and Iran, finalized in September, for the former to build nuclear power plants for the latter.

Jonathan Ruhe, fellow for American strategy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, told Jewish Insider that the FT’s reporting fits with Western intelligence findings from before the Israeli and American strikes on Iranian nuclear sites that the Islamic Republic was trying to reduce the time it would take to turn its enriched uranium into a bomb.

“These activities focused on simulating a nuclear explosion, without actually detonating a test device. Israel’s growing urgency about Iran’s progress contributed to its decision to launch the 12-day war when it did,” he said.

Arkady Mil-Man, head of the Russia program at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, told JI that there is “no doubt Iran is trying to rehabilitate its capabilities – nuclear and missile – and Russia is its strategic partner.” 

Earlier this month, after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke with Russia President Vladimir Putin, a Kremlin readout of the phone call said they discussed “the state of affairs surrounding Iran’s nuclear program.” 

Cooperation between Iran and Russia should be of great concern to Israel, Mil-Man said, and expressed hope that Netanyahu said as much to Putin. “It’s an existential threat. Russia is cooperating with Israel’s No. 1 enemy,” Mil-Man said.

Andrea Stricker, deputy director of the nonproliferation and biodefense program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told JI that “Russia has traditionally limited its assistance on Iran’s nuclear weapons program to applications that have plausible civilian uses, but which can also assist a nuclear weapons program.”

However, she added that “with Tehran’s help during the Ukraine war, it is possible that the Russians are willing to aid in ways that directly help on weaponizing or constructing nuclear devices.”

JINSA’s Ruhe said the Russian visits “suggest an openness to aiding Iran’s weaponization,” and also suggested that Putin’s position may have shifted due to Iran’s support for Russia in the Ukraine war. In addition, he said that in Putin’s view, “the more he could help Iran pull America’s focus away from Europe, perhaps all the better.” 

The Financial Times report did not include specific enough information to know whether the meeting would help Iran with nuclear testing, but Stricker said that media exposure “will help deter Moscow from contemplating more aggressive help for the Tehran regime’s efforts to rebuild or reconstitute the program.”

Sophie Kobzantsev, a research fellow at the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy, told JI that the partnership between Iran and Russia has its limits. (Lahav Harkov is a senior fellow at the Misgav Institute.)

“Russia always played a double game with Iran,” she said. “They gave them technology, weapons, air defense systems. In the nuclear area, they helped, but Russia was always part of the international organizations that inspected Iran’s nuclear program.”

“Russia wants Iran to be in a situation that it can control. … Putin understands nuclear deterrence, but he does not want things to get out of control. He doesn’t want the regime or the economy to collapse. He needs Iran to be stable enough to be managed,” she added.

Russia’s general approach to Iran’s nuclear program, Ruhe said, “has been to enrich Moscow and give it leverage, without moving Iran closer to a bomb.” 

As such, Russia played a role in building Iran’s reactor in Bushehr, worked on nuclear energy and research with Iran and now seeks to build nuclear power plants.

Iran is increasingly isolated due to the snapback of U.N. sanctions earlier this year, and Putin has indicated that he will try to leverage that isolation, with Russia calling the sanctions invalid, Ruhe said.

Iran doesn’t have many choices other than Russia to help it on the nuclear front, but Russia is motivated by seeking a greater foothold in the Middle East, Kobzantsev explained.

“Russia lost on two major fronts. They were mostly kicked out of Syria, and Iran and Hezbollah [were weakened],” she explained. “The American foothold in the Middle East can be seen everywhere; the Gaza plan, strengthening Iran’s rivals in the Gulf. Russia is mostly absent from the region.” 

Washington also recently took steps to strengthen its ties in Central Asia, what was once a major Russian sphere of influence, including negotiating peace between Azerbaijan and Armenia, and recent trade agreements with Kazakhstan.

“Iran sits on both of those points, and a significant foothold there would be important for Russia to rebuild its influence in the Middle East and create a counter to the U.S.,” Kobzantsev said. 

Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) cautioned on Tuesday that bombing Iran’s underground Fordow nuclear facility would leave significant enriched uranium buried underground.

“I’m a little confused on all the conversation about dropping a bunker buster on a mountain that’s filled with enriched uranium, and how that solves the problem. If you’re going to try to get enriched uranium out of the country, dropping a big bunker buster on it may disable the centrifuges in [Fordow], but you still have 900 pounds of enriched uranium sitting there,” Lankford told Jewish Insider. “And so to me, the most strategic thing we can do is find a way to get that enriched uranium out of there and also take out their capacity to do any more enrichment.”

He added that such an operation could be “[with Iran’s] consent [through a deal] or kinetic [military operations], one or the other.” Most experts believe that Israel lacks the ability to destroy the Fordow facility without U.S. assistance.

“They can’t have that level of enriched uranium sitting there in those centrifuges, all spinning, but just burying that uranium inside the mountain, I think, doesn’t solve the problem either,” Lankford continued.

Andrea Stricker, the deputy director of the nonproliferation and biodefense program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said that the risk from nuclear materials remaining at Fordow after an Israeli or American strike would be minimal.

“If the Israelis target Fordow they would likely render it, for all practical purposes, inaccessible. The highly enriched uranium stocks could survive but would be very difficult for the Iranians to reach,” Stricker told JI. “The United States using the 30,000-pound massive ordnance penetrators would effectively destroy the material or entomb it inside. “

She added that there is “little concern about a major radiological incident in either case. Any radiation and chemical hazard would be minimal and localized to the facility, requiring people to wear protective gear.”

She compared the possibility to the Israeli strikes on above-ground facilities at Natanz, where the International Atomic Energy Agency reported no significant concerns about radiological contamination outside the site.

Asked about whether the U.S. should be pushing for regime change in Iran, Lankford said that “the best thing that could happen is regime change there,” but did not endorse the idea of using U.S. forces to achieve that goal. President Donald Trump suggested on Tuesday that the U.S. could kill Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah, Ali Khamenei.

“This is a regime that chants, over and over, ‘Death to America. Death to Jews.’ And they’ve actively worked towards assassinating President Trump, assassinating former members of our cabinet, working for the undermining of the United States government, attacking our warships through the Houthis off the coast of Yemen,” the Oklahoma Republican said. “We need to see regime change there because I’m not sure things get better for the Iranian people, or for the region, until there’s new leadership with a very different vision.”

He said that while the nuclear threat is the most pressing issue, it’s hard to see how the situation will improve, how the Iranian government can ever be trusted or how the Iranian people could have better lives under the Islamic Republic regime.

Lankford said that, under war powers limitations, the U.S. military may not be able to get involved until it is attacked directly or until the administration can provide evidence that Iran is planning a direct attack on the United States or U.S. personnel, as it did for the 2020 killing of Quds Force Gen. Qassem Soleimani.

The Oklahoma senator said in a CNN interview that the U.S. should not “rush into a war” but added that “when we are attacked, when we are threatened, we can’t just sit back and pretend that’s not going to happen.”

“If 9/11 taught us anything, when people chant ‘Death to America’ thousands of miles away, that does have consequences, they can carry that out,” Lankford continued

He noted on CNN that there are also 700,000 Americans in Israel, and that what happens in the region will impact them. Lankford also said Iran is “dancing on a threshold there seeing how close they can get to attacking Americans without our response.”

Speaking to reporters on Capitol Hill, Lankford expressed support for the continued provision of U.S. aid to Israel to defend itself and carry on its military operations, and criticized colleagues who he said had not argued that additional congressional authorization was needed in order to provide U.S. support for Ukraine but are now taking a different approach to Israel.

“There seems to be a double standard among some of my colleagues that they strongly defend the rights of Ukraine to defend themselves, but hesitate on Israel,” Lankford said.